Autumn Mushrooms Quotes

Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes - the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons - and the elusive autumn aroma.

TIME WENT ON, life with the children unfolding in its own ecosystem, small plastic toys seeming to grow up from the carpet like mushrooms, clothes falling to the floor like autumn leaves. Every once in a while she would blaze through the house and clean everything--at which point, the process would start all over.

. . . a meadow which David had known before the coming of the motorway, where he had searched for mushrooms in previous autumns, in lost quiet golden hazes.

Those late August mornings smelt of autumn from day-break till the hour when the sun-baked earth allowed the cool sea breezes to drive back the then less heavy aroma of threshed wheat, open furrows, and reeking manure. A persistent dew clung sparkling to the skirts of the hedgerows, and if, about noon, Vinca came upon a fallen aspen leaf, the white underside of its still green surface would be damp and glistening. Moist mushrooms poked up through the earth and, now that the nights were chillier, garden spiders retired in the evenings to the shed where the playthings were kept, and there wisely took up their abode on the ceiling.

I thought of many an autumn I had known: Seemly autumns approaching deliberately, with amplitude. I thought of wild asters, Michaelmas daisies, mushrooms, leaves idling down the air, two or three at a time, warblers twittering and glittering in every bush ('Confusing fall warblers,' Peterson calls them, and how right he is): the lingering yellow jackets feeding on broken apples; crickets; amber-dappled light; great geese barking down from the north; the seesaw noise that blue jays seem to make more often in the fall. Hoarfrost in the morning, cold stars at night. But slow; the whole thing coming slowly. The way it should be.

It was one of those red-gold early October days, the air crisp and tart as heady as applejack, and even at dawn the sky was the clear, purplish blue that only the finest of autumn days brings. There are maybe three such days in a year. I sang as I lifted my traps, and my voice bounced off the misty banks of the Loire like a challenge. It was the mushroom season, so after I had brought my catch back to the farm and cleaned it out, I took some bread and cheese for breakfast and set out into the woods to hunt for mushrooms. I was always good at that. Still am, to tell the truth, but in those days I had a nose like a truffle pig's. I could smell those mushrooms out, the gray chanterelle and the orange, with its apricot scent, the bolet and the petit rose and the edible puffball and the brown-cap and the blue-cap. Mother always told us to take our mushrooms to the pharmacy to ensure we had not gathered anything poisonous, but I never made a mistake. I knew the meaty scent of the bolet and the dry, earthy smell of the brown-cap mushroom. I knew their haunts and breeding grounds. I was a patient collector.

When she was younger, Ellie used to believe that her invisibility was a metaphor for something else, assuming it was her awkwardness, her fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. She had thought as she grew older, more confident, wiser, she would outgrow this not being noticed. But lately, Ellie really felt like a ghost. She would be in a place, but not really there. People looked through her, past her. Her invisibility had taken on a life of its own. It wasn't a metaphor anymore, or a defense mechanism or eccentric little tic. She was actually invisible. At least, that was how it felt to her. Ellie wondered whether her parents were to blame. They were, after all, children of the sixties who had met at a love-in or lie-down or something of that sort, about which Ellie knew little except that a lot of drugs had been involved. Could Ellie's lack of physical presence be a genetic mutation caused by acid or mushrooms? Ellie grew up on their hippie commune among the highest, densest redwoods, where they dug their hands deep into the soil and grew their own food, made their own clothes. So perhaps it is there that the mystery is solved. Ellie indeed was a child of the earth, a baby of beiges and taupes and browns and muted greens. Nature doesn't scream and shout, demanding constant attention, and neither did Ellie. Maybe her invisibility was just her blending right in.

Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes— the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons— and the elusive autumn aroma.

I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than any sometime-later. I also like birds, mushrooms, the blues, peacock feathers, black cats, blue-eyed people, heraldry, astrology, criminal stories with lots of blood, and ancient epic poems where human heads can hold conversations with former friends and generally have a great time for years after they’ve been cut off. I like good food and good drink, sitting in a hot bath and lounging in a snowbank, wearing everything I own at once, and having everything I need close at hand. I like speed and that special ache in the pit of the stomach when you accelerate to the point of no return. I like to frighten and to be frightened, to amuse and to confound. I like writing on the walls so that no one can guess who did it, and drawing so that no one can guess what it is. I like doing my writing using a ladder or not using it, with a spray can or squeezing the paint from a tube. I like painting with a brush, with a sponge, and with my fingers. I like drawing the outline first and then filling it in completely, so that there’s no empty space left. I like letters as big as myself, but I like very small ones as well. I like directing those who read them here and there by means of arrows, to other places where I also wrote something, but I also like to leave false trails and false signs. I like to tell fortunes with runes, bones, beans, lentils, and I Ching. Hot climates I like in the books and movies; in real life, rain and wind. Generally rain is what I like most of all. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. Any rain, anytime. I like rereading things I’ve read a hundred times over. I like the sound of the harmonica, provided I’m the one playing it. I like lots of pockets, and clothes so worn that they become a kind of second skin instead of something that can be taken off. I like guardian amulets, but specific ones, so that each is responsible for something separate, not the all-inclusive kind. I like drying nettles and garlic and then adding them to anything and everything. I like covering my fingers with rubber cement and then peeling it off in front of everybody. I like sunglasses. Masks, umbrellas, old carved furniture, copper basins, checkered tablecloths, walnut shells, walnuts themselves, wicker chairs, yellowed postcards, gramophones, beads, the faces on triceratopses, yellow dandelions that are orange in the middle, melting snowmen whose carrot noses have fallen off, secret passages, fire-evacuation-route placards; I like fretting when in line at the doctor’s office, and screaming all of a sudden so that everyone around feels bad, and putting my arm or leg on someone when asleep, and scratching mosquito bites, and predicting the weather, keeping small objects behind my ears, receiving letters, playing solitaire, smoking someone else’s cigarettes, and rummaging in old papers and photographs. I like finding something lost so long ago that I’ve forgotten why I needed it in the first place. I like being really loved and being everyone’s last hope, I like my own hands—they are beautiful, I like driving somewhere in the dark using a flashlight, and turning something into something completely different, gluing and attaching things to each other and then being amazed that it actually worked. I like preparing things both edible and not, mixing drinks, tastes, and scents, curing friends of the hiccups by scaring them. There’s an awful lot of stuff I like.

The morning mushroom knows nothing of twilight and dawn; the summer cicada knows nothing of spring and autumn.

They drove about half a mile until they found their site. They were old hats, having been camping together several times. Sylvie opened the cooler and pulled out some chicken breasts to roast on the grill over the fire. She had also brought veggies she had washed and precut at home, then packed in aluminum foil with oil and garlic. "God that smells good, Sylvie. I'm friggin' starving." Molly settled into the black butterfly chair she always brought along when she camped. "I know, right? Food tastes so much better out here. I guess it's probably because you have to work so hard for it, huh?" Sylvie poked the chicken to check its progress. "Yeah, that and the fact that you cook like MacGyver. You could, like, make a feast out of two blades of grass and a mushroom, whereas I can barely manage to open a bottle." Sylvie looked at her friend sideways, but said nothing to the contrary, they both knew the truth of it. "I haven't eaten yet today and I'm about to faint. I think instinctively my body knows I'll need my strength for tonight." "Oh yeah? You got plans I don't know about?" Molly said jokingly. "I plan on dancing my ass off," said Sylvie. "Tell me please we brought a camera. We did, right?" "Please. You know I'm half Asian, right? My Japanese ancestors would be horrified if I'd forgotten a camera." Molly exploded into laughter.

The Czechs are downright crazy about mushrooms! In late summer and autumn, a foreigner might even get the impression that the number of sponge-hunting Czechs roaming about in the forests with a punnet largely exceeds the possible number of mushrooms.

The sight of the table, arranged in a gigantic horseshoe, signalled emphatically that autumn was passing and winter was coming. Game in all possible forms and varieties dominated the delicacies heaped on great serving dishes and platters. There were huge quarters of boar, haunches and saddles of venison, various forcemeats, aspics and pink slices of meat, autumnally garnished with mushrooms, cranberries, plum jam and hawthorn berry sauce. There were autumn fowls–grouse, capercaillie, and pheasant, decoratively served with wings and tails, there was roast guinea fowl, quail, partridge, garganey, snipe, hazel grouse and mistle thrush. There were also genuine dainties, such as fieldfare, roasted whole, without having been drawn, since the juniper berries with which the innards of these small birds are full form a natural stuffing. There was salmon trout from mountain lakes, there was zander, there was burbot

THE EARTH WITHOUT A SPIRITUAL DIMENSION except for the smallest white button of mushroom leading the rank-and-file up the rotting trunk of the oak, except for bulb, corm, pip, and spore and the passive mien of the autumn field when the off-kilter scatter and skyward rattle of grasshoppers have disappeared and except for the crowd of acacia thorns pointing toward all destinations possible in every direction out from the stem center of their circumferences and aside from the moss-and-mire covered bones of stripped roots and crippled branches left piled akimbo to molder among the beetles in the sinless murk of the forest floor, except for gorge, gulch, gully, and ravine, except for the moment waiting in the fist of the sycamore’s tufted fruit and in the sting of the loon’s longing before it cries and in the poise of the desert swallowtail before it lifts from the dry mountain wash and in the aim of the alligator’s undeviating glare before it swirls and sinks in the generative and ancient slough, except for the moment waiting in the green walls of palm spikes, pendants and rosettes, knots and currents of saw grasses and orchids, in the tight weave and bloat of prayers and weapons, in the moment before I move out into the empty plain of the open sky silent with sea-light, as if I were a wild and divine thing myself, to be going I know not where.

pie Week 2 DAYS/ MEALS DAY 1 DAY 2 DAY 3 DAY 4 DAY 5 DAY 6 DAY 7 BREAK- -FAST Banana-Amarnath Porridge Coconut-Almond Risotto Breakfast Tofu Scramble Beet Greens Smoothie Pear Oats with walnuts Breakfast Tofu Scramble Beet Greens Smoothie SNACK Classic Hummus Roasted Corn with poblano-cilantro butter Mushroom bun sliders Roasted Cauliflower Hummus Puffed Rice Balls Latkes Red cabbage with apples and pecans LUNCH Tofu Stir-Fry Zucchini and Avocado Salad with garlic herb dressing Tofu summer rolls Quinoa Vegetable salad Tamale Casserole Autumn Wheat Berry Salad Moroccan Lasagna SNACK An apple Easy garlic roasted potatoes Stuffed mushroom One ounce of water Latkes An orange Classic Hummus DINNER Curried Rice Salad Grilled tofu Caprese Clean Vegan Pad Thai Seitan Satay Warm rice and Bean Salad Mushroom Lasagna Spicy Asian Quinoa Salad

An alien priory, only a few miles distant, with its own miracle-working saint, and the great Benedictine house of Shrewsbury as empty of relics as a plundered almsbox! It was more than Prior Robert could stomach. He had been scouring the borderlands for a spare saint now for a year or more, looking hopefully towards Wales, where it was well known that holy men and women had been common as mushrooms in autumn in the past, and as little re